"Nen do my toat off," Viola gravely directed.
At that Grandma Holly crooned some single indistinguishable syllable in her throat, and then off came the cloak. The little warm, plump body in its fine linen emerged, rose-wise, and Viola smoothed down her frock, and freed her hair from her neck, and glanced up shyly. By the stir and flutter among them I understood that they were feeling just as I feel when a little hood and cloak come off.
"I like be made some 'tention to," she suggested gently.
Ah--and they understood. How they understood! Grandma Holly swept the little girl in her arms, and I know how the others closed about them with smiles and vague unimportant words. Viola sat quietly and happily, like a little come-a-purpose spirit to let them pretend. And it was with them all as if something long pent up went free.
Calliope left the door and turned toward us.
"Seems like my throat couldn't stand it," she said, ... and it seemed to me, as we three sat together in the dim little parlor, that Nita Ordway must cherish Viola for us all--for the grandma ladies and Calliope and me.
Half an hour later we three went out to the dining room. Viola ran to her mother when she entered. Nita took her in her arms and sat beside the stove, her cloak slipping from her shoulders, the soft peach tints of her gown shot through with shining lines and the light caught in her collar of gems. "I did want to get a-hold o' somethin' beautiful for them old ladies to see," Calliope had said.
"Oh," said Grandma Holly, and she laid her brown hand on Viola's hand, "ain't she _dear an' little an' young_?"
"I wish't she'd talk some," begged old Mis' Norris.
"Ain't she good, though, the little thing?" Mis' Ailing said. "Look at how still she sets. Not wigglin' 'round same as some. It was just that way with Sam when he was small--he'd set by the hour an' leave me hold him--"
A little bent creature, whose name I never learned, sat patting Viola's skirt.
"Seems like I'd gone back years," we heard her say.
Grandma Holly held up one half-closed hand.
"Like that," she told them, "my Amy's feet was so little I could hold 'em like that, an' I see hers is the same way. She's wonderful like Amy was, her age."
I cannot recall half the sweet, trivial things that they said. But I remember how they told us stories of their own babies, and we laughed with them over treasured sayings of long-ago lips, or grieved with them over silences, or rejoiced at glad things that had been. Regardless of the Proudfit party, we let them talk as they would, and remember. Then of her own accord Nita Ordway hummed some haunting air, and sang one of the songs that we all loved--the grandma ladies and Calliope and I. It was a sleepy song, whose words I have forgotten, but it was in a kind of universal tongue which I think that no one can possibly mistake. And out of the lullaby came all the little spirits, freed in babyhood or "man-grown," and stood at the knees of the grandma ladies, so that I was afraid that they could not bear it.